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OBAMA EXTENDED A FRIENDLY HAND TO CASTRO TO AVOID THE IMMINENT COLLAPSE OF THE CRUMBLING COMMUNIST REGIME

As stated by Senator Jesse Helms, “Flooding Cuba with new U.S. investment and American tourists will do nothing to bring democracy to Cuba. To the contrary, it will give new life to Castro’s crumbling regime.

Here’s why:
As almost any Cuban will confirm, the real cause of the misery of the Cuban people is not the U.S. embargo—it is Castro’s Marxist-Leninist economic system. Castro’s Cuba is a brutal police state; Castro maintains power by fear, intimidation and deprivation.

His regime controls every aspect of Cuban life—access to food, access to education, access to health care, and access to work. And if you say the wrong thing in Castro’s tropical gulag, you lose your job. If you refuse to spy on your neighbor for the government, you don’t get to go to college. If you dare to organize an opposition group, you go to jail.

U.S. investment won’t change this. It won’t empower individual Cubans nor will it give them independence from the regime. Why? Because foreign investors cannot do business with private Cuban citizens—they can go into business only with Castro. Consider: it is illegal in Cuba for anyone except the regime to employ a Cuban citizen. Everyone works for Castro.

Foreign investors cannot hire nor pay Cuban workers directly. They must pay Castro in hard currency for the workers. Castro then pays the workers in worthless Cuban pesos, while keeping the rest. Under these circumstances, U.S. investment cannot help average Cubans—it would only help the Castro regime.

Consider a real-life example: Sheritt International is Canada’s single largest investor in Cuba today. It is operating a stolen American-owned nickel mine at Moa Bay, where roughly 1,000 Cubans work as virtual slave laborers. Sheritt pays Castro approximately $10,000 for each of those Cuban workers. Castro gives the workers the equivalent of about $10 a month in Cuban pesos—and then pockets the difference.

The result? Sheritt provides Castro with a $10 million direct cash subsidy each year. And what does Castro do with that hard currency infusion? He uses it to pay for the ruthless and cruel apparatus that keeps him in power— and the Cuban people in chains.

Foreign investment can thus do nothing to promote democracy, nothing to promote entrepreneurship or independence from the state. What it does is directly subsidize the oppression of the Cuban people.

Tourism is another source of hard currency for the Castro regime that Castro is desperately seeking to expand. Every one of the tourist dollars spent in Cuba ends up in government hands—the Cuban government owns all the hotels, and it owns all the stores on the island.

And another side effect: Cuba has become the world’s capital of SEX tourism. Thousands of destitute Cuban women, who cannot survive in Castro’s Marxist-Leninist economy, have no choice but to prostitute themselves with foreign tourists from Canada, Italy, Germany and other nations to get hard currency.

Many of these prostitutes—or jineteras—are schoolgirls as young and 12 and 13. Others are educated women— doctors and lawyers—who cannot earn enough practicing their professions under Castro to feed their families. Americans simply must not become a part of this degradation of Cuban women.

The United States must continue the embargo to keep up the pressure for change on the island, because if we don’t give up our leverage by unilaterally lifting the embargo, Castro’s successors will he forced to exchange normalized relations with the United States for a complete democratic transition in Cuba.

Fidel Castro isn’t going to live forever. He is going to leave power in Cuba— either vertically or horizontally. And we need to start planning for the day when he is no longer there as the unifying force for tyranny on the island.
That is why maintaining the embargo, by itself, is not enough. We need to start helping the Cuban people prepare for that day, by helping them to create an independent civil society, helping them to build free institutions, and getting resources to the human rights advocates, independent journalists and democracy activists so they can expand their space in society—just as Ronald Reagan helped the opposition leaders in Eastern Europe (who are now the presidents and prime ministers of free, democratic nations).
Last year, along with two dozen co-sponsors, I proposed bipartisan legislation— the Cuban Solidarity Act—to provide $100 million over four years in humanitarian relief directly to the Cuban people through private charities on the island. We will pass it, and send a message to Fidel Castro—and to the Cuban people that Congress and the Administration arc united in our support for freedom in Cuba.

I look forward to the day when Americans can once again go to their corner stores and purchase Cuban cigars. But those will be cigars will have been produced by free labor in a free and democratic Cuba. To get to that day, we must keep the pressure on Castro, while simultaneously working to help the Cuban people build a free and independent civil society within the crumbling shell of Castro’s teetering communist regime. “

JESSE HELMS ON CIGAR AFICIONADO June 1999

The truth of the matter is that all the help received by Castro’s regime after the collapse of the Soviet Union through western tourists and western investments and trade, have been proven to be a total failure in bringing any freedom to the Cuban people, the oppression, the misery have continued and the Cubans still live under conditions even worse that those under which the slaves lived during the Spanish rule.

A real world embargo worked to put an end to the South African apartheid government. Why then ask United States to follow a policy already used by European, Canadians, Japanese and more than 120 countries around the world?
Their trade and investments proved to be a complete failure in bringing democracy or better living conditions in Cuba. Castro is still in power because only United States has remained in solidarity with the Cuban plight for freedom while the rest of the World has been accomplices of the Cuban genocide.